A. Field
The present invention relates to a method for selecting a personalization interface of a portable data carrier and to such a portable data carrier.
B. Related Art
Diverse portable data carriers are known that are personalized for the particular end user for exclusive use by the latter, for example because the data carrier bears confidential information or grants access to certain personal services. Such portable data carriers are in particular chip cards, e.g. in the form of account or credit cards, mobile communication cards or the like. Such portable data carriers are mostly prepared for the intended service, e.g. provision of mobile communication connections or handling of credit card transactions, not directly by the manufacturer, but by an issuer of the data carrier to the end user which is independent of the manufacturer.
Personalization of the data carrier, i.e. unique assignment of the data carrier to an end user by installing personalization data, can fundamentally be effected either by the manufacturer or by the issuer of the data carrier. The-personalization data used are personal data, such as name and address of the end user, or also data generated independently of the person that can be uniquely assigned individually to the end user, such as cryptographic keys, passwords or the like.
The loading of the personalization data into the data carrier is currently effected predominantly by the manufacturer of the data carriers using proprietary personalization methods which for this purpose interact with corresponding proprietary software personalization interfaces set up on the data carriers, The personalization of a data carrier by the issuer thereof is in turn only possible, due to the likewise proprietary personalization technology of the issuers, with data carriers that also comprise proprietary software interfaces of the issuers. Such a proprietary personalization method is described for example in EP 0 565 389 A1.
It is therefore the object of the present invention to show a way of personalizing portable data carriers that is flexible and largely independent of proprietary technologies.